Bevis Hillier

Fine artist, but a dirty old man

I have always been sceptical of those passages in the ‘Ancestry’ chapters of biographies that run something like this: <em>Through his veins coursed the rebellious blood of the Vavasours, blended with a more temperate strain from the Mudge family of Basingstoke.</em>

I have always been sceptical of those passages in the ‘Ancestry’ chapters of biographies that run something like this:

Through his veins coursed the rebellious blood of the Vavasours, blended with a more temperate strain from the Mudge family of Basingstoke.

I have always been sceptical of those passages in the ‘Ancestry’ chapters of biographies that run something like this:

Through his veins coursed the rebellious blood of the Vavasours, blended with a more temperate strain from the Mudge family of Basingstoke.

Those passages seem to claim too much for heredity, and to bear out A. J. P. Taylor’s dictum that snobbery is the occupational disease of historians. But there are some nexuses of talent in allied families that just can’t be denied — the blood cascading down the generations like rills mingling in a grotto. The most flagrant example is the Darwin-Wedgwood-Huxley pedigree. I’d also point to the Literary Longfords, the Amises, père et fils, and Evelyn Waugh, his children and grandchildren.

Those are all examples of inheriting brains like family heirlooms. But with the descendants of the Punch cartoonist and book illustrator, Linley Sambourne, you have to ask: can artistic sensibility also be inherited, aesthetics rather than linguistics or scientific acumen? The father-and-son Holbeins, Cranachs, Cromes, Pissarros and Filippo and Filippino Lippi (Filippino was the illegitimate son of Browning’s friar and a nun), the glass engravers Laurence and Simon Whistler and those stalwarts of The Antiques Road Show, the ceramics experts Henry and John Sandon, suggest the answer may be yes. And then look at Linley Sambourne’s descendants.

At a time when the Albert Memorial was a national laughing-stock and Victoriana in general were derided, Sambourne’s granddaughter, the Countess of Rosse, preserved his house as — what it still is — a time- capsule of Victorian London; and in that cluttered house, with its japonaiserie furniture and blue-and-white china, she, John Betjeman, Nikolaus Pevsner and others founded the Victorian Society in 1957.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in